Friday afternoon, at about 1:40 pm EST, a passenger jet flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing…
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According to the AFP and
the BBC, the oil slicks were tested in a lab and did not match
samples of airplane fuel.

At least 40 ships and 34 airplanes from
nine different countries have joined in the search for missing plane,
which Malaysia's civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman
described on Monday as an "aviation mystery."

"Unfortunately we have not found
anything that appears to be objects from the aircraft, let alone the
aircraft," he said at a news conference on Monday. "As far as we are concerned, we
have to find the aircraft, we have to find a piece of the aircraft if
possible."

Floating debris found on Monday,
initially believed to be a life raft from the plane, turned out to be
an unrelated object.

A source from the investigation in Malaysia told Reuters that the plane likely broke apart mid-air, probably because of mechanical failure.

"The fact that we are unable to find any debris so far appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet," the source said.

There is some hope that the plane's
flight recorder will be found floating in the ocean, according to
Commander William Marks of the U.S.'s Seventh Fleet, which has joined the search. From the BBC:

"In calm seas, if there were a
soccer ball [football] or a basketball floating in the water, the
radar could pick it up. They [flight recorders] typically have a
radio beacon and so for example our P3 [radar] - if they are flying
within a certain range of that - will pick up that radio beacon. We
have not yet picked up anything, but that's typically what those
black boxes contain."

Meanwhile, Malaysian police have identified one of the two people who boarded the flight using a stolen passport. The passenger is reportedly not from Malaysia, but no other information about his identity has been released.